cup. You wait for someone to feel guilty, and then their wallet disappears. Go practice on tourists.’
The boy flinched.
He did not defend himself. He only pulled the cup against his chest and backed away.
‘I didn’t mean to bother you,’ he said.
Then he crossed to the far side of the awning and sat with his back against a pillar, hugging his knees so tightly his shoulders rose to his ears.
Vivian sat on a metal bench and lit no cigarette, though she wanted one. Daniel had made her promise years before he died that she would stop. She kept promises to the dead better than promises to the living.
The boy’s silent shape remained at the edge of her vision.
Her anger had nowhere to go. That was when the idea came.
A test.
The kind she understood.
Earlier that afternoon, Vivian had withdrawn forty-two thousand dollars from a private account. The cash was meant for the quiet purchase of a lien on an old inn south of the city, a property Daniel had once loved. She had not wanted the transaction moving through company accounts where Martin and Celeste could interfere.
The banded bills sat inside the hidden pocket of her coat.
Vivian removed them slowly.
The stack looked obscene in the plaza light. Too much money to hold in one hand. Too little, she thought bitterly, to buy loyalty.
She tucked it into the outer pocket of her coat with more than half showing. Then she leaned back, lowered her chin, and closed her eyes.
She even let her breathing deepen.
The trap was crude. That did not bother her. Human nature did not require elegant bait.
For the first minute, nothing happened.
Rain ticked against the awning. Somewhere beyond the terminal, a ferry horn moaned across the black water. A bus hissed at the curb and pulled away.
Then came the scrape of small feet.
Vivian kept her eyelids lowered, open only a narrow slit.
The boy approached slowly. Not like a thief, exactly. Like a child approaching a sleeping dog that might bite.
He stopped in front of her.
His hand rose.
Vivian felt triumph bloom coldly in her chest.
There. Of course. Everyone reached for what was not theirs when they thought no one could see.
But the boy did not take the money.
His fingers touched the edge of the cash. Carefully, almost tenderly, he pushed the stack back into her pocket. He pulled the flap over it, then pressed it flat with both palms so the bills disappeared.
‘Lady,’ he whispered. ‘Wake up.’
Vivian opened her eyes.
He jumped back, fear flashing across his face.
‘I didn’t steal it,’ he said quickly. ‘I swear. It was showing.’
Vivian stared at him, unable to assemble a sentence.
The boy glanced over his shoulder toward the street. ‘You shouldn’t sleep here. Bad people are watching you.’
‘What bad people?’
He pointed with his chin.
Across the plaza, half hidden near a loading zone, a black SUV idled with its lights off. Vivian had noticed it earlier and dismissed it as another city vehicle. Now she saw the shape of someone in the driver’s seat.
The boy lowered his voice. ‘The woman from the restaurant told a man to scare you. She said
